The Job of the Wasp

by Colin Winnette

  I swam toward the center of the lake, drifting deeper and deeper, until my lungs grew tight and I had to go up for air. I kicked out from under where I imagined the corpses would be and swam toward the lake’s surface, which the rain was working like a sewing machine. I treaded water there, catching my breath and looking for the bodies. I’d lost them in the rain, but would a clear day betray their location? My teeth knocked together. My arms were tired. I went under one last time to confirm the job was done, pushing myself deeper until my feet finally stabbed into the silty lake bottom. Plants grabbed at me, but I batted them back. The water was deep, I had no doubts now. Given that, and the length of the rope, Ms. Klein and the boy were sure to be more than a few feet under. Deep enough for a canoe to pass over them, or even a swimmer.

  Confident in my work, I kicked toward the surface until my head met something solid. It held me under the water like a palm as I pressed it with my hands, trying quickly to move it or to find an edge. I screamed whatever oxygen remained in my lungs and slammed my fists into the mass above me. A moment of clarity was delivered upon me as I struggled, and I realized that, were I to die here in this lake, joining the corpses of my teacher and the boy I did not know, the other boys at the facility would happily go on with their lives. There would be no search, as there hadn’t been for Fry. The Headmaster might register my absence, but only as an inconvenience. He would frame the next new boy, or an old boy he’d grown tired of, and he would tell Hannan that he’d dealt with me in private.

  I had no companions, no one to grieve for me. I had not had the impact I would have liked. I clawed at the oppressive shape and eventually found a seam. A long, narrow opening, which I realized was where the bodies met. The darkness at the edges of my vision grew, as I dug my fingers between the corpses, pulling at them and sliding my hand along each grisly feature, until I was suddenly, blissfully free.

  the ghost

  The garden hoe had been washed clean by the rain. I filled in the hole in the garden’s plot, then gathered the other tools into the wheelbarrow, which was now bent slightly at the middle. Even so, getting everything back up the hill was comparatively light work.

  The toolshed was sealed with a padlock upon my return. Clean and gleaming, spotted with rain. There’d been no padlock before. I’d heard nothing about a key. I had no doubt this was an obstacle intentionally set in my path by unknown schemers, pranksters, or the Headmaster.

  I flipped the wheelbarrow so it wouldn’t gather water. I set the tools under a jutting edge of the shed’s roof. I glanced at the lake, which sat like a mirror on the horizon.

  The other boys were in their rooms when I returned. I heard no tears through the doors, saw no fear at all on the faces of those whose doors had been left open. It would have been easy to assume these boys knew nothing of what had happened to the boy I’d been sent to the garden with, or to our teacher. But it was just as easy to suspect that some of them did know, that Hannan had in fact seen what I thought he might have seen, and that he’d told them by now, or at least some of them, in confidence or conspiracy. It was also possible he’d gone to the Headmaster in my absence. I was fine not knowing who my opponents were just yet, as I would find them all out eventually and deal with each, one by one. I was stronger than they might have imagined: Hannan, the Headmaster, or any other boys pitted against me. I had a young body, a keen mind, and an old soul. This would not go as easily as they hoped.

  I walked the length of the hall, stopping just short of my room, where, through the opened door next to mine, I saw a familiar boy on his back in bed. I recognized him from the dishwashing line, as he was always on it. In fact, thinking of it, I realized I’d never seen him do any other work. I noticed now that he had a scar that ran across his chin, a thick line that marked the base of the jut. Though we shared a wall, though we slept only a short distance from each other every night, I couldn’t remember us ever having actually spoken. I wasn’t even sure if I knew his name. But because of his perennial place on the dishwashing line, I understood that the Headmaster didn’t like him. For that reason, I felt close to this boy in that moment. I couldn’t have guessed at what had gone on between the two of them, but whatever it was, I stood outside his door, reflecting briefly on the sadness of his existence. There had been a point in his life when people had looked at him and thought he might have done anything at all with himself. They would have seen nothing but potential in him, and it might have appeared to them, and maybe even to him, that anything and everything was within his reach. And now he worked the dishwashing line.

  I took a breath. My mood was affecting my thinking. The truth was, I knew nothing of the boy’s history, his family, the circumstances of his birth. He might have been born in a bucket, for all I knew, and dumped into the street from a third-story window. Maybe there’d never been any hope at all.

  With that, my sadness evolved into actionable pity. The poor boy, I thought, needs to be given a chance. It’s possible he’s never had one. It’s likely he is yearning for one, underneath his casual presentation. I couldn’t imagine a better candidate for a comrade. Surely he wasn’t satisfied with his lot in life, and a

  sense of belonging might in some small way renew his faith in himself, which had likely been scrubbed out after so many years on the dishwashing line.

  I stepped into his room and shut the door behind me.

  “Have you seen Hannan?” I said.

  He didn’t get up or look over. “I heard you drew naked pictures of Ms. Klein,” he said.

  “So you have seen Hannan,” I said.

  He blinked at the ceiling. “No,” he said. “But he wasn’t on the dishwashing line after lunch. I came straight here after. I’ve hardly seen anyone.”

  I shook my head. I grieved for this boy and felt strengthened in my resolve.

  “I’d like to purchase one,” he said.

  “What would you like to purchase?” I said.

  He sat up, checked the door to confirm it was shut. “One of your pictures,” he said.

  “I haven’t drawn anything,” I said. “And besides, the Headmaster has all the drawings in his possession, and I’m at the beginning of a punishment for their existence.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I get it. But if you were to somehow find yourself in possession of one, a new one, say, I’d pay a decent price for it.”

  “You’re a pervert,” I realized.

  “I’m Nick,” he said. “I’m a young boy, and I’m lonely. And I am deeply in love with Ms. Klein. Are you so different?”

  “Of the list,” I said, “you and I share one attribute. But what would you consider a decent price?”

  “I’d pay you two dollars for a quality drawing.”

  “Out of the question,” I said, and I turned to leave.

  “Five dollars,” he said, “if I can see it first and determine the quality.”

  “You can see it for one moment,” I said, “but you can’t hold it or touch it.”

  “If you happen to come into possession of one, you mean,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “if one finds its way to me.”

  I went to my room and drew a crude portrait of Ms. Klein, as I’d seen her. Only I straightened the fingers and imagined her hair flowing and full.

  I brought the drawing to Nick only moments later. I shut the door again and held it up for him.

  “It’s terrible,” he said.

  “Now that we are in each other’s confidences,” I said, “I’d like to form an official alliance.”

  “But it isn’t good,” he said.

  “People are dying,” I said. “The bodies are stacking up. You haven’t heard about it yet, I’m now sure, but you will soon enough. Everyone will. And when they do, people are going to start choosing sides. I’m ahead of the game. I have information no one else does. But I need someone on my side. I have a plan for how to get us all out
of here safely and securely, while other people are going to pit us against one another in order to ensure their own survival. Those selfish brutes will be the people we are against in our alliance. It will be us versus them. We will be courageous and sympathetic, but strong and committed to our plan. What do you say?”

  “Who is dead?” he said.

  “There are two already,” I said. “And I assure you the situation is likely to yield more by the end.”

  “How did they die?”

  “They were murdered.”

  He went white.

  “It’s started,” he said.

  “Twice,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “It’s the ghost. There will be five.”

  “There’s no such thing as the wandering dead,” I said. “That’s a contradiction. I need you to focus on what’s happening, not what can be imagined.”

  He didn’t respond. He was blank and pointed toward the heavens.

  “Did you hear what I said?” I said.

  “You have a plan to keep us safe?” he said without looking at me.

  “I have the only plan that will work,” I said.

  “What’s the plan, then?” he said.

  “Buy the drawing to declare your loyalty,” I said, “and we will put things into action immediately.”

  “But it doesn’t look like anything,” he said.

  “It’s a symbol,” I said.

  I did not have a plan, but I could now make room for one to develop. The others would surely come up with something fast, and the lot of us would divide according to our sense of who most promisingly assured survival. Prior loyalties could play some role in this division, but fear shatters loyalty, especially among young boys.

  I paced the length of my small room, trying to understand what could be done. The rain had not let up. There was thunder and lightning now as well, but it could not reach me.

  “Ha,” I yelled at the ceiling, where the rain was being forced to stop.

  The most urgent thing was to find Hannan. To find out what he knew. It was possible the Headmaster was hiding him somewhere. It was also possible the Headmaster had never sent him down to the garden at all. If the Headmaster was even madder than I’d originally imagined, if the teacher’s murder hadn’t in fact been the boiling over of a tumultuous and forbidden affair but instead one episode in an ongoing nightmare perpetrated against the forgotten children abandoned to his care, it was likely he’d also done something to Hannan, adding that poor boy’s disappearance to the suspicious circumstances he’d built up around me like a child playing with a beetle, setting down obstacles and forcing it to walk back and forth while slowly drawing those obstacles closer together until the beetle has nowhere left to crawl, has not even enough room to get its bloated body turned around to face the direction in which it had originally intended to go. Surely there was a way to keep the walls from closing in.

  I had no sense of how long I’d been walking the lengths of my room, so I went to the window. The sky was dark and the building seemed to shake in the rain. I was outraged at being made to feel so helpless. I wasn’t helpless at all. I wasn’t a beetle. I wouldn’t circle until it was too late and then expire. There were paths yet to imagine, and every plan houses infinite corruptions.

  I sat at my desk and made several more pictures of Ms. Klein. I marched them to the Headmaster’s office, where he was standing at the window, watching the storm. There was a low fire in the fireplace and I could hear the rain sizzling against the coals as it found its way down the chimney. A yellow foam pad wrapped in bungee cords sat by his desk next to several green military bags.

  “There’s lightning in the mountains,” he said.

  “These are the remaining drawings,” I said, setting the fresh pages on his desk, where there was still a little pile of fully folded paper. “And my drawing materials,” I said, handing over the pencils as well.

  “Good,” he said. He nodded at the window. “It presents a problem.”

  “That’s all of them,” I said. “There are no more. If any more turn up, they are not of my creation. You should know that I’ve heard rumors of other boys taking up the same practice, though I’ve never seen it for myself. Do you believe me?”

  He turned back to the desk, lifting the pages.

  “You have a real talent,” he said. “It’s unfortunate this is the way you’ve chosen to express it. But I was a boy once. I understand the magnetic draw of nudity and violence. Though I’m putting a stop to it, that doesn’t mean I can’t see it as an understandable enough expression of the desires you might be feeling that you aren’t sure what to do with. It’s an important step you’re taking toward mastering the strange forces of adolescence.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I watched his scheming face.

  “Can I trust you with an announcement?” he said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  He lifted my pages from one side of the desk, walked around to the other, and opened a drawer from which he withdrew several more pages. He thumbed through them, an odd smile on his face. He lifted the other stack from the shelf behind his desk and flipped through it as well.

  “Tell the other boys we are on lockdown for the foreseeable future,” he said. “This weather system has made it over the mountains and settled into our small valley here. It’s intensifying. It will get worse before it gets better. We had lightning accidents last year due to negligence on my part. I have accepted the blame and improved my strategy. They won’t be happy to hear it. They’re used to getting to play in the rain. They’re used to taking the storms casually. But not this year. It’s a lockdown, plain and simple, until further notice.”

  “What happens during a lockdown?” I said.

  “I’ll set up in my office,” he said, kicking the foam pad. “And no one is to leave the main building without my express permission. I’ve already dismissed Ms. Klein, and I will fill in for her for the time being. You’ll all go to class and to the dining hall, where, until further notice, we’ll eat what rations are stored in the kitchen. There will be no outside play and no visits to or from beyond the valley.”

  I did not flinch at the mention of Ms. Klein’s dismissal. I stood my ground, swallowing stomach acid like saliva. If my eyes were watering, it was because of the smoke from the fire.

  “When will it end?” I said.

  He’d made his way over to the hearth, where he was crumpling the pages and tossing them casually into the flames. “When the weather changes,” he said.

  “How long will that take?” I said.

  The fire snapped a coal onto the carpet.

  “It was almost a month last time, but these storms do as they please. We just have to remain calm and be patient,” he said, smothering the coal with the heel of his loafer.

  He would fill in for Ms. Klein. It was brilliant. Despite the threat it posed to me, I had to admit the plan was a marvel to behold. He was a stunning opponent, the Headmaster, one perpetually a step ahead of me, operating just beyond the horizon of my thought. If I’d accepted responsibility for the drawings, thereby partially relieving the pressure he planned to suggest might have forced me to strike out against Ms. Klein, he would respond by tightening his grip (under the auspices of protecting us, no less), heightening the tensions inherent in the lots we’d been cast, the sorrowful day-to-day lives we each led in our prison of sorts, our desert island of castaway boys, so that it no longer mattered if he succeeded in framing me, as, at the end of all this, one of us, one of the boys in his charge, was sure to snap, or fold, or bend, or break, in a way that would benefit him and maybe help divert any suspicions cast his way. On top of that, if Hannan had in fact seen what happened in the garden, and if he had told the Headmaster about it, then I was not only a boy with evidence linking him to an obsessive relationship with the murdered Ms. Klein, but demonstrably a murderer of children. With
me doubly damned, the Headmaster knew he could be calm and patient in his planning, and I would have to simply wait the matter out, responding to each new snap of the trap as it announced itself, as my guilt would make me fundamentally unreliable in the eyes of any potential investigators, not to mention in the eyes of my cohort.

  While he could not have brought on the rains that evening, the Headmaster had certainly taken advantage of the opportunity they presented, as he seemed almost always to be able to do. I could see it in that moment with him by the fire. This, whatever this was, wasn’t something that began with me, but something I had stepped into the middle of. My first day was in no way the first day qua first day, but some unremarkable middle day, hardly noticeable on the list of what had happened and what would happen, and the Headmaster had simply accommodated my presence in the way he accommodated all new additions, developments, or complications—that is, casually and effectively, because the Headmaster was either a mastermind of murderous behavior or, more likely, he’d been at it for so long that he was simply well-practiced in and comfortable with the complicated dynamics of executing the long-term, variable planning it required. I was sure that, prior to my first day, year after horrible year, he’d managed to come up with something to explain away whatever strange occurrences led to the disappearance of a boy, or a teacher, say, or anyone else upon whom he felt the axe must fall. How casually everyone had absorbed Fry’s disappearance. And now, possibly, Hannan’s too, as, if he hadn’t in fact seen me in the garden and rushed directly to report it all to the Headmaster, thereby receiving sanctuary and being hidden for deployment at a later development in the plan, if he hadn’t seen and done those things, then, it became suddenly clear to me, Hannan was simply missing. A cause for alarm. And regardless of what Hannan’s true fate was, to the other boys, who it was possible had no idea of what had happened in the garden, to those boys, Hannan was simply gone. There was no sign of Hannan and no clear way for them to understand his disappearance. They didn’t even have the comfort of a theory, which, I had to admit, I did, however menacing mine was. And yet there’d been nothing in the air of the dormitory to suggest that we’d lost yet another member of our cohort. Strange, indeed.